Last week, III announced that they are removing a number of
circulation functions from the telnet menus in a software update that
became generally available this month. From what I've been able to
surmise, functions that will be removed include placing holds and
checking things in or or out. Removing these menu options will break
scripts that have been in use for years at institutions in our
consortium, and lots more staff time will be required to perform
certain tasks after some systems are upgraded.

Apparently, III recently discovered that a bug involving holds was
caused by the character-based system, but it is also related to a
desire to port everything to Millennium. Based on the reasoning behind
the announcement, future updates are likely result in other mission
critical scripts breaking as other character-based functionality is
deprecated.

Just a reminder of the risks of relying on automation that depend on
interfaces that are losing vendor support.

kyle